

The most-frequent methods used by UX professionals, from our free UX Careers survey report.

The chart below shows how often UX practitioners reported engaging in these methods in our survey on UX careers. It’s a good idea to use different or alternating methods each product cycle because they are aimed at different goals and types of insight. Some methods may be more appropriate than others, depending on time constraints, system maturity, type of product or service, and the current top concerns. When deciding where to start or what to focus on first, use some of these top UX methods.

The diagram lists potential UX research methods and activities that can be done as projects move through stages of design. The chart below describes UX methods and activities available in various project stages. This advice applies in the common case that you can’t get budget for all the research steps that would be useful. Do most user research early in the project (when it’ll have the most impact), but conserve some budget for a smaller amount of supplementary research later in the project.As we show below, there’s something useful to learn in every single stage of any reasonable project plan, and each research step will increase the value of your product by more than the cost of the research. The earlier the research, the more impact the findings will have on your product, and by definition, the earliest you can do something on your current project (absent a time machine) is today. Do user research at whatever stage you’re in right now.One of the questions we get the most is, “When should I do user research on my project?” There are three different answers: At every stage in the design process, different UX methods can keep product-development efforts on the right track, in agreement with true user needs and not imaginary ones. Alongside R&D, ongoing UX activities can make everyone’s efforts more effective and valuable.

User-experience research methods are great at producing data and insights, while ongoing activities help get the right things done.
